Variational Treatment of the HeH+ Ion and the β-Decay in HT

Abstract

The nonrelativistic energies of the HeH⁺ ion have been computed by the variational method for the ground state and for the first excited ¹Σ⁺ state. The wavefunction employed was a 64‐term generalized James—Coolidge expansion. The computed binding energy of the ground state amounts to D_e=16448.3 cm⁻¹ at the equilibrium separation R_e=1.46324 a.u. The excited state is found to be repulsive. The HeH⁺ wavefunctions are used to compare quantitatively the theory of β‐decay in molecules with experiment. It is shown that for the HT molecule, the theory predicts the dissociation in at least 17.8% of the events while the corresponding experimental number is 6.8%±1.9%.